Have you started to notice broken icons in the Sitecore Content Editor recently? In this post I'll dive into the root cause of the issue and how to fix it.

After upgrading a client to Sitecore 8.1 Update 2, I started to notice broken icons in the Content Editor in the client's Dev, QA, and Production environments like in the picture below:

I did some digging and found that several of our templates had the absolute path to the icon cache for the icons from my local machine:

The client's Dev, QA, and Production environments all use different URLs, so when these templates are pushed up to those environments, the Content Editor is unable to resolve the icons.

The root cause of the issue turns out to be the Recent Icons tab in the Content Editor. A change in Sitecore 8.1 Update 2 causes any icons selected from the Recent Icons tab to use the absolute path of the icon from the icon cache rather than relative path:

I reported the issue to Sitecore and they acknowledged the issue as a bug. Sitecore has given the bug public reference number 136362. If you contact Sitecore about this issue, please use this reference number.

This bug affects the following versions of Sitecore:

• Sitecore 8.1 Update 2
• Sitecore 8.1 Update 3
• Sitecore 8.2

Being awesome as usual, the Sitecore Support team quickly issued a patch to fix the issue. You can access the patch on GitHub here: https://github.com/SitecoreSupport/Sitecore.Support.136362/releases. This update makes a small change to sitecore\shell\Applications\Content Manager\Dialogs\Set Icon\SetIcon.js in your Sitecore install. In lieu of using the patch linked above, the only work around at this time is to avoid selecting icons from the Recent Icons tab when you choose an icon for your templates and items.

Have you been affected by this issue? If so, let me know in the comments. Cheers!